Aligning Digital Sovereignty With Physical Territory: The EU’s Evolving Perspectives

The tension between sovereign control and global interdependence defines the internet from a legal perspective. It is not intuitively clear how to regulate the internet or how to apply the law online. The European Union has been developing an optimal approach to law and the internet and to ensuring its law adequately covers internet activities. The EU legal framework has undergone a significant transformation.
The following discussion traces the evolution of jurisdictional criteria in EU digital law. It begins with the predecessor of the GDPR, the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, which used the physical location of hardware and processing equipment as a criterion for determining the applicability of the law. This territorial focus shifted with the E-Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC, which established the 'country of origin' principle, centring applicability on the place of establishment for legal entities or the residence of natural persons. Over the last ten years, the focus has shifted toward the destination-based principle, first introduced by the GDPR (2016) as a hybrid model alongside its establishment. In 2022, the DSA, a regulation amending the E-Commerce Directive, prioritises only the location where the service is received, moving beyond physical or corporate presence to address the borderless nature of the digital economy.